


came to with a fist fused in glass

by thought



Category: Red vs. Blue
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-03-13
Updated: 2015-03-13
Packaged: 2018-03-17 15:54:44
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,515
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/3535301
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/thought/pseuds/thought
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>All Tex wants is to get to Carolina before she goes over the edge of the cliff. Technically, she succeeds.</p>
            </blockquote>





	came to with a fist fused in glass

Tex falls back into her body with a sickening sort of lurch. Reality shifts and Alpha is replaced by the bland screen of a terminal, and the limitations of the physical world slam back into her senses-- it's only now that she realizes she'd been without the sensation of armour on skin, air on the inside of her mouth, the shrill scream of alarms in her ears. She shuts down the part of her mind that wants to follow those sensations through systems and wires and does she, in fact, feel the way the back of her boot rubs her heel raw, or is it simply a subroutine? And is that really so different from the human brain-- is she not human, then? Is it the soul or the body that makes the woman? And does she have either? She's spent five days on the verge of an existential breakdown, trapped in a tiny shuttle with York and Delta (which is cause enough on its own) while they ran dark and fast to avoid detection by the MoI. She hadn't come to any conclusions beyond "yes, we're absolutely going back to fuck shit up," but the experience of actually fucking... uploading herself to a fucking computer has set the thoughts back in motion.

She straightens up, and wonders if her muscles should protest being held in the hunched position for-- thirty seconds. Well. It'd felt like longer. Replace one unsettling idea about her existence with another. Snow has already drifted gently onto the bridge, and her boots kick up tiny flurries around her ankles as she crosses to the front of the bridge where the glass is nothing more than a pile of jagged fragments and shards that crunch under her boots. She hears the doors hiss open behind her, the crisp click of two sets of polished dress shoes on deck plating ominously familiar. She kicks her way out through the remaining glass before either The Director or The counselor can reach her, emerging into a landscape of white in all directions under a twilight grey sky, wind buffeting her armour as she tromps further away from the ship. She hears them first, microseconds before she realizes that there's something off to her left a different shade of white from the snow. Her HUD outlines two friendlies near the edge of the cliff. She and York had, by silent accord, refused to designate any of their teammates as hostile until definitively proven otherwise. She turns towards them just in time to see a flash of red and blue against the snow, hair and armour and why the fuck would Carolina take her helmet off--

Maine rips the AI out of the back of Carolina's neck with a casual efficiency that's jarringly wrong for the context of team. Tex starts running on instinct, doesn't know what the fucks' happening but struck with a bone-deep awareness that something is critically wrong. When Maine lifts Carolina like she weighs nothing and moves to hurl her over the edge of the cliff Tex is still too far away. She's running as fast as she can-- wishes she knew how to make this artificial shell that is apparently her body move faster, thinks if she only gets one fucking benefit of the fucking shitty hand she's been dealt it should be this. She watches Carolina’s body hover in mid-air for what feels like hours, focus narrowed down to the singular objective of reaching her before she falls.

Maine lets go.

Tex reaches.

***

Beginning installation: program Beta to P\01  
Initializing direct connections components for 60g/sec  
Calculating space requirements  
Warning! Not enough space on P\01, insert expanded storage device or cancel process

Cancel

Beginning installation: program Beta to P\02  
Initializing direct connections components for 60g/sec  
Calculating space requirements  
Warning! Not enough space on P\02, insert expanded storage device or cancel process

Override

Compressing files Beta\temp\STM  
Compressing file Beta\core\tactical  
Compressing file Beta\core\personalitymatrix  
Warning! Some files in Beta\temp\stm and Beta\core\tactical could not be compressed. These files have been deleted and can be restored from prior versions at next program reboot.

Initializing direct connection components at 60g/sec  
Error: unable to establish connection  
Initializing Direct Connection components at 20G/sec  
Connection established on P\02

Installation complete.

 

***

Tex is falling. Tex isn't quite sure how she knows she's falling-- no, wait. There is cold air against her face. Equilibrioception takes a bit longer to register, but she somehow knows with absolute certainty that she's falling before she can feel it. Her hands fumble to yank up her grappling gun at the same time she notices the vicious pounding in her skull and the way her stomach is trying furiously to empty itself. She watches as she shoots out a line, snags on to the side of the cliff, swings in and struggles to breathe through the wrenching shock as her shoulders take the full weight of the sudden stop. Her body twists to avoid a face-first collision with the edge of the snowy rock face, and Tex finally realizes that while all of this has been happening she hasn't actually been moving. Yet she has, obviously, the screaming pain in her shoulders and the rock at her back is evidence of this.

'Fuck, fuck, fuck, fuck, Maine was working with them; hasn't been the same since Sigma; my AI; wish I had York’s' healing unit; need to get back up; like rock climbing during basic; fucking ass hole; almost broke my wrist; shoulders probably dislocated; need to stop climbing shit; need to get my helmet; Eta and Iota gone?; my responsibility; all of them my responsibility; why would Maine take them?; doesn't make sense--'

'Aww fuck,' Tex thinks. Loudly, and with perhaps the most feeling she has ever uttered those words. Also, turns out she is physically incapable of saying them out loud which is the sort of realization that should cause some sort of panic reaction but everything feels muted and delayed so it's closer to vaguely uncomfortable.

She (they, fuckfing tell it as it is) almost fall off the cliff.

"I'm dead," Carolina says. Out loud. "I'm dead and this is hell. I knew I should’ve applied for grad school instead of the military."

Tex gets the associated burst of memory before she can block it: bureaucratic nightmare of LSE’s poli-sci department, Kholo getting glassed on the news on the vid screen in the library, the rush of frustration and the need to be doing something. The desperate push to go faster. She thinks she should not be seeing this. 'Like that would've helped,' she replies flatly.

"Ok," Carolina says evenly. "Forcible removal of the AI is bound to have some side-effects. Think of Wyoming. This is probably completely normal."

'I'm in your head,' Tex says. 'I'm inside your brain.'

Carolina ignores her and starts working her way back up the cliff face.

'You should've jumped for that rock on your left,' Tex says conversationally. 'We're probably gonna die now. You were shitty at the climbing wall-- oh, no. Ok. Shitty sergeant, though.'

"Whatever I did to deserve this hallucination I am very very sorry and I will probably not do it again," Carolina grunts, hauling herself up and somehow managing to ignore the fact that her shoulders are possibly literally on fire.

'You're not hallucinating,' Tex says. 'Why the fuck are we going back up, did you miss the part where most of your team, including your CO, is crazy and wants to kill you?!'

"I'm not going to talk to the voice in my head."

'This explains so much about your implantation issues.' She realizes a couple seconds after she's said it that possibly that was a bit insensitive. Considering Carolina's climbing her way towards probable murder and/or court martial she's not feeling all that sympathetic.

"I'm not crazy," Carolina mutters. Something in her upper arm tears alarmingly and Tex experiences the strange sensation of all of her senses whiting out while her consciousness remains unaffected. They don't fall. It's a fucking miracle.

'I'm going to die like this,' Tex says once Carolina's done throwing up into the endless casim below. 'You're gonna get us both killed; I hate you so much, I can't believe I tried to save you.' This last is a lie, of course. Carolina's a good soldier and, from what Tex saw when not directly interacting with her, a decent human being. Tex isn't the sort of person who turns her back on her team.

Thing is, those are the only reasons. She's gone over every Carolina-related emotion she's harboured, from the respect to the fondness to the irritation, poked them and turned them inside out and upside-down searching for some hidden connection, something instinctual in her programming that calls out to protect the other woman and came up empty. Part of her feels like she's failed as a result, like there is an obligation to which her emotional capacity has proven unfit. Thanks to York and Delta she knows more than she ever wanted to about AI theory --and Leonard Churches brand in particular-- so she knows there is no reason that she would feel any connections to people from Allison's life. Impression modeling doesn't work like that, and even if it did she's not an imprint of Allison’s brain structure. She's... something else. Extraneous data too stubborn to be deleted. A blank slate, more so, perhaps, than the other fragments. She wasn't created with the same complexity as Alpha, most of her primary pathways for independent thought and reasoning having been auto-generated by whatever process they used to separate her from Alpha. Without Alpha there to maintain the active production and encoding of the Allison memory template external factors shaped her code and development in unpredictable and rapidly branching directions. It's more than she's ever wanted to think about her own self-determination. She kind of hates York and delta, actually. No one should have to spend that many days alone with them. It's legitimately incredible they haven't collapsed under the weight of their own dying star of cyclical philosophical bullshit.

"I'm probably already dead," Carolina says cheerfully. She keeps climbing, because she hates herself, probably. "This is hell."

'You're not dead,' Tex snaps, and then, 'No, that doesn't mean the cliff was a failure at being a cliff, Jesus fuck, is your mind actually like this all the time? Don't answer that. ...you don't need to answer that because I already know. This is awful, no wonder you went crazy.'

"Ok, explain," Carolina says. She's decided to humour her obviously malfunctioning brain as distraction from the way she can't feel her right arm below the elbow.

Tex wonders where she can even start. Wonders if it's worth trying to explain to Carolina, military loyalty wrapping around familial duty all fueling a goal-oriented personality with a terrifying amount of drive. Also, there's the part where she thinks Tex is a hallucination. Inconvenient. Tex wonders what Maine and Sigma are doing with the AI. Figures she's only got a few minutes until she finds out first hand. Something to look forward to.

'How much do you know about The Director's AI experiments?' she asks.

Before Carolina answers Tex already knows what she's going to say and what she was going to keep back and every branching idea and stray associated thought that came along with it. It's a bit overwhelming and she's got no idea how to filter out the extraneous data, but it does give her an idea. She tries to remember the feeling of Omega pushing tactical strategies or theoretical outcomes into her head. The memory comes slow and faint, lacking depth. It's not very helpful, but it gives her a starting point. She does her best to gather the entire experience, from her own strangely intense training sessions with The Director and The counselor, to CT’s message, to her own research, and finally the plan that she had cooked up with York and Delta and Omega. She tries to leave out her conversation with Alpha-- it seems too personal. She's not sure if she succeeds. The process of pushing the information dump to Carolina is a bit different than what she'd experienced with Omega; she's not so much transferring data as reaching in to Carolina's consciousness and redirecting a couple neural pathways to access the information. Tex saw Maine pull out Carolina's AI chips. She's trying really hard not to think about where that means she's currently stored, but her mind provides a helpful greyish white squishy sensation nonetheless.

It's not until she's opened Carolina's mind to the data (or at least she hopes that’s what she's done, discovering that she's a fucking computer program didn't provide a secret user manual) that she considers maybe hanging off the side of a cliff wasn't the best place to do this. To her credit, Carolina's grip on the rocks doesn't falter. They're hooked to an outcropping a few meters above them, but Tex still doesn't like the idea of swinging away from the cliff face. Carolina breathes in and out slowly a couple times, coughs up bile, presses her forehead against the icy rock in front of her.

"You never completed your AI coursework, that was a fucking lie," she snarls after a minute. "Next time, some warning would be nice. I can access the information myself if you point me in the right direction. You can't just sideload a few terabytes of data like that, I could've had an aneurism. It's a good thing there's a lag. If you'd been directly implanted instead of in my armour slot-- which are in my helmet at the top of the--"

'Don’t' think about it,' Tex says. 'Keep climbing, I'm looking forward to being recaptured or killed horribly once we get to the top.'

"We need to get the others," Carolina says. "If what you know is correct we can't just leave them there."

'It's correct,' Tex says. 'And what others, exactly? York's probably long gone or dead, North was gonna get his sister out, and Florida would rather turn us in to ONI along with The Director so he can sit back and watch the world burn. Maybe with a nice cup of hot chocolate.'

“Wash was still in Medical. And Wyoming--"

'Got the fuck off that ship as soon as he realized Freelancer was fucked,' Tex says. 'I will bet actual money on this, he and Gamma are probably well on their way to buying this entire planet right now.'

"Wash," Carolina says. "His implantation didn't take, and now I've got my own suspicions about why that is."

'The ship crashed! He's probably dead.'

Carolina snorts. "Wash? No. Wash isn't dead, trust me. Besides, Tex. You're not suggesting we abandon our team, are you?"

'York told you about that, huh?' Tex says, instead of 'So *now* I'm part of the team?'

"Yeah," Carolina says. "It's one of the few things he *did* tell me."

'You're taking this remarkably well,' Tex says after a few minutes of silent climbing.

"No," says Carolina. "I'm not. But I have to get to the top of this cliff before I can do anything about it."

Tex stays quiet. She's working on keeping herself blocked off from Carolina's general thoughts, but the overall flavour of her mental landscape is the dangerous sort of calm that comes just before a grenade goes off. It's probably going to lead to some sort of repression-related breakdown and/or trauma in the future, but for the moment Tex can only picture Carolina as a cleansing fire burning through the Project relentlessly until there's nothing left.

When they reach the top of the cliff Maine is nowhere to be seen, but Tex's body is standing a couple yards away from the shattered front of the ship, hefting what appears to be a giant sheet of metal torn directly off the side of the hull. It's still glowing faintly, heated and warped from the trip through the atmosphere.

'Aww shit,' Tex says. 'Omega.'

"You're kidding me," Carolina says flatly. Tex's body turns towards them. It's a fucking disconcerting experience.

'What the hell is he doing in there?!' Tex demands.

Carolina shrugs. "Cackling," she suggests innocently. "Plotting how to take over the world. Messaging Wyoming for mustache tips."

'I wish you'd never found out about him,' Tex says with feeling. Carolina's humour is a tissue thin veneer over a rising tide of hysteria and fury, and Tex is very very good at riding the waves of someone else's rage without sinking below the surface.

Omega takes a few slow strides towards them. "Agent Carolina," he says, voice still that ridiculous low growl of the voice modifier. "Some advice. Don't ever be alone."

Carolina smirks. "Good thing for me I'm not, isn't it?"

'I'm living in a fucking cartoon,' Tex says, and jumps. Landing back in her own body is like emerging from being far under water and coming up from anesthetic all at once. Her senses are clearer, her emotions fuller, her memories immediate and rich with complexity again. She fights a vicious but brief battle with Omega for control of her body, but by now she knows all of his tricks, and she's back in control within a couple of seconds. When she opens her eyes Carolina is standing right in front of her, too close. Fucking speed unit.

"Take off your helmet," she says, and all the humour is gone from her voice.

"What the fuck, Carolina? This doesn't look like helping Wash."

"I said take off your helmet," she snarls. "Or I'll do it for you."

It's fucking cliché and rude as shit and kind of unnerving, the way she's all up in Tex's space making fucking demands. And that is definitely all it is, what a goddamn inappropriate time to be thinking anything else, Jesus. Omega laughs at her. She's still holding the giant chunk of metal, and she's not sure if she wants to put it down as a good faith gesture or hold on to it. Even after spending time in her head --maybe especially after spending time in her head-- Tex doesn't trust Carolina not to try anything. In the shape she's in she wouldn't be much of a challenge, but there's still the principle of the thing. Also, Maine's not showing up on any of her trackers and it's unnerving as fuck.

"You know what I look like," Tex says. Maine could be anywhere. North or Reggie could be out there with a fucking sniper rifle. Nobody's loyalties are clear enough that she feels comfortable popping her helmet off out in the open without a damn good reason.

"I need to see," Carolina says. She's got a gun in one hand. The tips of her ears are probably frost-bitten to the point of serious damage. There are scrapes and dents decorating her armour, and her hair has come loose from its tie to whip around her face in the wind. Even in armour, she's noticeably shorter than Tex, and she's holding her neck and shoulders with the careful precision of someone with some pretty severe injuries.

"That's an order, Agent," Carolina says, softer. Her eyes are flickering fast side to side, aware of her environment even without the added data of her HUD. Her grip on her weapon is solid.

Tex takes off her helmet. Omega's fury crisps the edges of her thoughts, but her focus is on Carolina. She studies Tex intently, brings a hand up like she wants to touch her hair and then drops it with a sharp gasp of pain, quickly stifled. Tex stands still and quiet, like standing for inspection by a superior officer. Which is, she thinks wryly, pretty much exactly what she's doing. Finally, Carolina lets out a long breath, and some of the tension goes out of her jaw.

"Do I pass?" Tex asks, trying to come across sincere instead of the sharply bitter resentment that wants to escape.

Carolina blinks. "You're not-- The hair, maybe, but."

Tex does not make the practically obligatory jab at The Director's preferences. She deserves a goddamn award. Relatedly, North and South are probably somewhere nearby. This is such a terrible time for an emotional moment, they're both going to fucking die out here. "I'm not her," Tex says, to speed things along.

Carolina nods. "No. I'm glad he didn't make you look like her. It would've been... disrespectful."

"Because the fact that I exist isn't disrespectful or anything," she says. "And on the topic of continuing to exist, can I put my helmet back on?"

Carolina nods jerkily. "Yeah. Yes." She turns away, exchanges the gun in her hand for a larger one mag-clamped to her back. "Let's go get our team, Agent Texas."

Tex shoves her helmet back on, swings her own weapon onto her shoulder, lets a bit more of Omega's rage bleed into her consciousness. "Yes Ma'am," she says, with a bright, dangerous grin.


End file.
